I owe everyone a long form explanation. Here is how a viral tweet turned into a very stinky Proof of Concept for my company, Soup.
A month or so ago, I tweeted something that hit the timeline like a nuclear weapon. I created days of discourse that had about as much value as nuclear waste, I upset a lot of my friends, and most importantly, I went viral. Then, I threw a really, really weird party about it, called Love Stinks. During this party, I made people smell and rank dirty t-shirts, and then matched them with likely partners based on this data.
I have to admit: all of this was on purpose… but not for the reasons you think. I’ll explain.
If you managed to miss the tweet and the resulting psychic damage, I am referring to this one:
A few days before I posted this, I had just had dinner with a very sweet, cute, talented friend of mine. She’s gorgeous, ambitious, funny, and single. I really can’t say enough good things about her. Her reasons for being single made sense: she couldn’t find a man to keep up with her, someone who would treat her as an equal, someone who she could feel she was in a comfortable partnership with. Dating in New York is hard.
I racked my brain for friends that fit the archetype of who she was after, and I came up pretty empty. My guy friends were already taken, going through something, in a totally different place in their life, or just not a good fit for her.
So I hatched a plan.
For a little background: I have a lame talent, in that I’m really, really good at the X algorithm. I’m able to generate outsized reach. I go “viral” somewhere between monthly and quarterly. It’s not uncommon for people to screenshot my tweets, repost them on another platform, and go giga-viral. I’m original poster of the torture rack tweet, for example. Another piece of cultural material that I originally created was the plotting on your upfall tweet. I may or may not have given the universe the phrase “grey market chinese peptides”. It doesn’t really matter. I’m good at the algo, good at getting reach, and I have a lot of strong opinions about my abilities and my place in the world.
My plan was pretty simple: I’ll tweet some ragebait. It will go a little viral. I will use the creator payout to host a party. I’ll curate that party under my company Soup. It will serve as a proof of concept for what Soup is up to, and I’ll find my friend a date. I get something to put in my portfolio (and hopefully funding), she gets a man, everyone wins. Simple.
It’s never that simple.
My tweet went too viral. I caught too many people. I got Cernovich (who stole 1.5M views from me by posting a screenshot instead of a QT), there was much subtweeting, the twitterati came out to play, and the discourse took on a life of its own. I upset many of my male friends. This part was unintentional and I owe them all a sizeable apology.
The girl who I had originally tweeted all of this for also got upset with me. I had anonymized who I was talking about, and included aspects of 4-5 different women I know. I also entirely made some women up. This didn’t matter, because she knew the parts that were her, and the comments were a lot of psychic damage. I sent her a long apology, and she still hasn’t read it.
I did not forsee the next four days of discourse happening. I will be more careful with my bait in the future. Lessons were learned. I did not stop here, though.
I’m not one to miss an opportunity to do the most. Like, I will do way too much. I decided that I’d already come this far, already made a mess… may as well not stop here.